It's not about independence for the sake of independence for Ken Westman, CEO of Aitkin, Minn.-based Riverwood Healthcare Center.
"We really feel that we can best take care of our communities and achieve our missions by staying independent without having some other outside influences," he said. "We're in our communities, we know our patients."
Riverwood and 18 other rural Minnesota hospitals are aiming to keep that independence through interdependence. On June 27, the hospitals announced the launch of the Headwaters High-Value Network. At the center of the collaborative is a clinically integrated network featuring the 19 hospitals and more than 50 clinics that will provide coordinated care to 750,000 residents. The network will set up operational collaborations designed to control costs and spread best practices among its members.
Mr. Westman is serving as the chairman of the Headwaters HVN board of directors. He said one benefit of the collaboration will be boosting value-based care.
"We can't do value-based models of any significance because we don't have the scale by ourselves," Mr. Westman said. "By coming together, we have the scale to sit down with payers and work on value-based arrangements for the benefit of our communities and the patients we are serving."
They're also working on getting a data system, something the hospitals wouldn't be able to afford on their own.
"Having access to data is critically important for us to be moving in this direction of value-based healthcare," he said. "Many of the hospitals in this network have been participating with the Medicare ACO [...] To be successful and even to participate, you've got to have access to the data. Not just within our walls with our own healthcare organizations, but when patients are going elsewhere as well. We have to have access to that cost and quality data."
The daily management of the network will be led by principals from Cibolo Health, which also manages the Rough Rider High-Value Network, a collaborative of 23 critical access hospitals in North Dakota, which launched about a year and a half ago. Among those Cibolo Health principals is president and CEO Nate White.
"In this model, Ken and those CEOs own the [clinically integrated network], they run it, they manage it, they invest in it," Mr. White said. "And by allowing them to come together and create those economies of scale, they're actually able to deliver an improved service to their communities."